


About A Hurl

by petit_bonbon



Category: Yuri!!! on ICE
Genre: Awkward Flirting, M/M, Phichit Calls Dibs on Best Man, Romance, University Setting, Victor is Making It Messier, You're Welcome, Yuuri's Head is a Mess, alternative universe, in a good way
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-09
Updated: 2017-01-10
Packaged: 2018-09-15 23:38:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9263930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/petit_bonbon/pseuds/petit_bonbon
Summary: A difficult final project. Yuuri Katsuki hurled straight into Victor Nikiforov’s arms by a horrible - actually brilliant - best friend. Hijinks and chaos. Hamster-induced prophecies. Romance.





	1. Yuuri

**Author's Note:**

> After devouring my fair bit of Yuuri/Victor fluff and hashing out "You'd totally do this crap to me" situations with my Peng You, this is the result.
> 
> EDIT: By the way, this isn't a one-shot. I'm still trying to figure out how this site works, so please bear with me. :)

“Your final project is to capture someone’s essence.”

Yuuri looks up from his notes and squints at his professor, a crease already high on his forehead. It was the first day of classes after winter break, and Yuuri was more than ready to dive back into his studies. He’d always quite done well with most of his core subjects, but he wasn’t so sure he was doing so great with this Elective, which was why he could tell that this week’s assignment was seriously going to ‘bust him in the chops’, as Phichit liked to say.

This was the same Phichit who already had his hand in the air and was waving it a little too enthusiastically for anyone’s tastes, “What do you mean by ‘capturing someone’s essence’, Sir?”

What did essence even _mean?_

“How else do you ‘capture essence’, Chulanont?” Chris, a fellow classmate, pipes up, eliciting laughter from the class.

“I have a feeling you would know very well, Mr. Giacometti,” the professor dryly quips before continuing, “You all spend far too much time with social media, and not enough time with reality, so for this assignment, I’d like you to choose an unknown subject and get to know it, sans filters.”

As the teacher delves into the specifics, Yuuri’s mind swims while he switches on auto-pilot mode. While he’s written down the gist of the assignment, he could not think of anyone, or anything, he’d like to get to know more. While he liked studying, it wasn’t because he was passionate about knowing more; it was just something to pass time that he just so happened to be quite good at. To be exact, he went to college because it was expected of him, nothing more, nothing less.

Besides, would finding something interesting really matter now that graduation was so close he could practically smell the ink on his diploma?

As soon as the bell rang signaling the end of class, Yuuri hitches his backpack higher on his shoulder and joins the crowd of students shuffling in the hallway.

Guess there was no way around it.

For the first time in his life, he would be flunking a subject.

 

* * *

 

“You are not flunking the Elective.” Phichit huffs as he takes a huge bite of his pizza. The cafeteria was packed and loud, and they actually had to sit close together to accommodate the other students, but Phichit’s voice was loud enough to draw people’s attention to them.

On most days, Yuuri’d probably remind his friend to use his indoor voice, but today was not one of those days. Not when Yuuri himself was feeling equally shitty about what he was about to do.

“I’d really rather focus on the other subjects right now, and—”

“Bull. You’re just giving up without giving this a try.” His roommate gives him The Eye, and just like all other The Eyes before it, it is terrifying and makes Yuuri feel like a small, lost child.

Yuuri hates it, but he hates himself more because Phichit was right. He was about to ruin such a great GPA, just because he found studying people—a person, just one actually— too difficult.

And why on earth did he get a salad when all he wanted to do was stuff his stomach with a nice, heavy, comforting meal that would lull him to sleep once he got back to the dorms? “Oh, I don’t know, Phichit,” he stabs his lettuce, “People are too…”

Complex. Unreadable. Flighty. What was the word?

It comes to him.

“Difficult. Anyway, why can’t I just study you?” Yuuri almost whines.

“Because that’d defeat the purpose of the assignment!”

“And since when did you care about schoolwork?”

“Yuuri, if the assignments involves you opening up your world a little, I’m all for it. Besides,” Phichit stuffs the remainder of the pizza in his mouth, “What’s the worst that could happen?”

Well, whatever it was, Yuuri didn’t want to find out.

 

* * *

 

On a crisp Wednesday afternoon, Yuuri and Phichit are on their way to their second class of the day when he appears. He, being senior university student-slash-demi-god Victor Nikiforov, of course.

Naturally, Yuuri looks away. While he was not the biggest fan of people, he finds that there is something about Victor Nikiforov that he cannot deny. Which of course is why he cannot even look at him. Because if Victor Nikiforov even catches his eye, he might die. Or combust. Or both. And he’d be burning in an eternal flame.

Yuuri shakes his head to clear his head from cheesy 80s songs.

Beside him, Phichit murmurs, “So, it’s not that you don’t want to study someone… It’s just that you already have someone in mind.”

Yuuri opens his mouth to ask him about his utterances when the Thai quickly pulls him in to his side… and with a spectacular hip bump, sends him flying straight into the arms of a very startled Victor Nikiforov, who had all but dropped his things to catch him, a wayward spinning Japanese man.

Right then and there, Yuuri knew that his best friend was a horrible person.

But when the aforementioned ex-best friend had the gall to use this moment when everyone was staring at him in shock to use his indoor voice to utter, “You’re welcome!” and leave him, Yuuri knew that he had a mission to eradicate the most vile, most—

“Are you okay?”

Oh lord. Right. He was in Victor Nikiforov’s arms, and he was staring into his gorgeous aquamarine eyes and—

Complex. Unreadable. Flighty.

Difficult.

Yuuri pulls himself together at the last minute and bends down to pick up Victor’s things, “Yes, I am so, so sorry. My friend, ex-friend, is a terrible person.” He closes his eyes and thinks that it is at this moment that Victor will snort and go on about his merry day without remembering this incident, unaware that Yuuri wouldn’t be able to sleep at nice because of this very close, very physical encounter.

But to his surprise, Victor laughs as Yuuri hands him his books, “What’d he do to become an ex-friend?”

He literally hurled me at you, Yuuri thinks, but says, “He thinks he knows me better than myself.”

“Don’t all good friends?” Victor rakes a hand in his hair, a gorgeous silver mane, “What’s your name?”

“Don’t have one.”

Yuuri mentally slaps his mouth, horrified at the words that run from it. But Victor only laughs again, cementing Yuuri’s belief that he is literally an angel.

“Okay, Nameless. I’m Victor,” the bell rings, making him groan, “And I’m late for class. See you around.”

Yuuri watches him go, stunned at how... easy that went. He made a blunder—blunders—and Victor wasn’t mad, and he didn’t call him names, and the whole encounter was surprisingly normal.

Slowly, he trudges to his own classroom, mind reeling from the events that transpired in the last few minutes, not noticing that he’s got a hand on his heart… as if he was making sure that it was still there.


	2. Yuuri

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In this chapter:  
> Yuuri's battle with his anxiety continues,  
> Hamster Yuuri and Hamster Victor make their debut! and  
> Phichit bruises Victor's body?!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, and thank you for sticking around to read Chapter Two of About A Hurl. :)
> 
> I've been listening to some songs lately, and being an 'atmosphere person', I've been imagining Spangle Call Lilli Line's 'Dreamer' as OP, and Rino Oishi's 'Marry' as ED to this fic. You can find them both on Spotify*, if you have that.
> 
> *I don't own the rights to these songs.

The first time Yuuri ever saw Victor Nikiforov was actually when he was a cat.

Back in his freshman year, their Lit professor required her class to watch any of the university’s stage play productions, and Yuuri had decided to pick whatever was playing the soonest so that he could get started on the reflection paper.

The play was Cats.

Yuuri reckoned that he’d watched stranger things anyway.

It was okay, a bit zany, and when Yuuri got lost as to what was happening, he instead thought of how to approach his reflection paper.

But then he heard the sexiest thing in his life.

“Meeow.”

Yuuri shivered, the hairs on the back of his head tingling. The air was thick, charged, _electrified_.

_What in the world was happening?_

As it turned out, Yuuri didn’t have to wait long to find out, because a remarkably feline creature sauntered onstage, oozing with such sensuality and confidence Yuuri didn’t know that a single individual could possibly possess.

It was cathartic, and Yuuri had never felt so alive.

The Rum Tum Tugger’s every move was exhilarating, and every note he sang made Yuuri’s heart fly. For reasons unknown, Yuuri wanted to climb that stage and _join him_. It didn’t matter how suggestive his pelvic thrusts were, or how hypnotic his body shimmied around the stage and the other cast members, Yuuri wanted to revel in him, because even in the unfortunately dim spotlight, this human-cat _shined_.

And if human-cats could be that carefree and could own themselves with that much conviction, then Yuuri wanted it.

 “Wasn’t Victor great?” Yuuri’s seatmate had gushed to her friend during the intermission.

Great? His face twitched. His hands were actually curled around his seat, and he was afraid to move in fear of breaking the spell Victor had cast, and he’d wake up back in his dorm room.

Victor wasn’t great; he was _god_.

And to all gods and deities, he watched Victor take his curtain call, mortals like Yuuri might as not exist at all.

 

* * *

 

 

“Sooooo, Hamster Yuuri, what do you think of Hamster Victor? Isn’t he cuuuuuute?” Phichit bubbles at the two hamsters he’s isolated from the rest, making Yuuri sigh deeper into his pillow. Unsurprisingly, Phichit had a grey hamster and a black one amongst his litter, which had resulted in little nightly hamster skits nightly ever since the day he had purposely made Yuuri collide with Victor. (“They’re perfect!” He squealed that very night as he lifted the two unsuspecting hamsters into a separate play area.)

“Will you knock it off already?” It had been two days since the incident and Yuuri actually hadn’t seen Victor since. Not that he’d know what to do anyway when he comes face-to-face with him again. “Besides, I think your hamsters are very confused right now, what with you changing their names come nighttime.”

“Don’t listen to him, Hamster Yuuri,” Phichit cooes as he feeds the black hamster with a tiny piece of cabbage, “You just follow whatever your hamster heart tells you!”

It looks to Yuuri’s human brain, that Phichit was actually scaring Hamster Yuuri a bit. He watches the hamster dubbed Hamster Victor play with his pellets alone and thinks that that moment when their paths tangled was a one-off from the universe, a ‘look but don’t touch again’ warning.

“To be honest, I don’t understand it.” Phichit says.

His fascination with Victor? Yuuri agrees, because he doesn’t get it either.

Phichit, however, seems to pick up on what Yuuri isn’t saying, “No, like, the next time you see him, just say hi. How hard can it be?”

He was envious of how Phichit could say anything that came to mind without it being A Very Big Deal.

Annoyed—at himself or at Phichit or both, he pushes himself off the bed and laces his running shoes on, “I’m going for a run.”

Tucking in his key inside the pocket of his shorts, Yuri leaves their shared room and runs out into the cold night where the moon is bright and high.

He enters the brightly lit track and field oval, his breath in white puffs.

In the distance, a dog yelps as if excited by the prospect of a new face, a new friend, before being shushed gently by its owner.

 Yuuri smiles a bit at this, remembering the dog he’d left behind when he came to Detroit to study. Last he’d heard, Vicchan wasn’t doing so well…

He didn’t know what happened after that. He stopped calling home, afraid of whatever news he would hear.

He runs harder, and he feels a cramp coming on. In his haste to run away from all the things going through his mind, he’d forgotten to do his warm-ups properly and now he was paying for such an amateur mistake.

Wincing as he stretches, Yuuri feels like a bigger idiot for thinking that the universe could ever be on his side, even on such a lonely, cold night.

 

* * *

 

 

The universe sends another one-off. Or is it a two-off by now?

It was once again Phichit-orchestrated, and Yuuri thinks that the head of a certain Thai would look absolutely lovely mounted on his bedroom wall.

“You’re welcome!” Phichit shouts before running far, far away from Yuuri’s wrath.

“Your friend—” Victor groans as he rubs his chest where Yuuri had hit him, making the younger boy flush at his actions.

“Ex-friend,” Yuuri murmurs before bowing low, “Sorry.”

“Ex-friend,” Victor agrees, “He has quite the hip on him, huh?”

“The mouth, too.” Yuuri grumbles, making Victor smile.

Victor has very nice teeth, white and even. Discreetly, Yuuri traces his teeth with his tongue, reminding himself of how uneven they are.

“Do you have a name for me yet?”

“Does it matter?” Yuuri blurts out, and his rude remark catches them both off-guard. His face flushes, because that wasn’t what he’d actually meant. He was talking to himself about his own teeth, and oh God, this was a mess he just had to get away and

“Sorry,” Yuuri presses his books to his chest and scampers away.

“Nameless and Sorry,” Victor yells, “Looking forward to your next name then!”

Yuuri keeps his head down, because those words actually suited him the most right now.

 

* * *

 

“How’s the project going, boys?” The Elective professor asks Phichit and Yuuri when they pass him by in the hallway. Phichit beams and launches into a brief explanation on how he chose his subject and his progress, surprising Yuuri at how serious his friend was about this project.

When the professor turns to Yuuri, he only responds with a nervous, “It’s going.”

It wasn’t a total lie; his project was going all right. Going straight into the dumpster, that is.

Yuuri had already made the calculations, and even if his final project was a total dump, he’d still scrape by and he’d still get to graduate. He’d just have a terrible grade that he wouldn’t be able to explain to anyone who knew him and his work ethic as to how he got it.

So on another fateful day, when they were on their way to the cafeteria, Phichit, conspiring with the universe, did it again, and Yuuri Katsuki once again flew all over Victor Nikiforov in entire view of the student body at the cafeteria.

Victor still doesn’t look at all bothered that he had a man sprawled all over him in full view of everyone, “Again?” He laughs out loud, making Yuuri gape at his heart-shaped mouth, “We have got to stop meeting like this, Nameless.”

“I am so sorry—”

“Ah, Sorry, that’s your another name—”

“—promise to kill my friend, ex-friend, and offer his blood to—”

“It seems like your friend, sorry, ex-friend, is trying to tell us something, no?” He leads Yuuri to an empty seat nearby and extends his hand,  
Let’s do this again. I’m Victor Nikiforov, and you are…?”

Ashamed. Appalled. Embarassed.

Dead.

But for once, Yuuri’s mouth cooperates, “Yuuri Katsuki.”

“Yuuri Katsuki, huh? Finally, a name.” Victor smiles, “Would you like to—”

“No. I mean, yes. But no.” He is appalled at the word vomit that spews from his mouth, “This is terribly confusing—”

“Okay,” Victor nods, in all seriousness, “Just… calm down.”

Yuuri is surprised at how well Victor is taking this, talking to his anxiety-ridden self, that he actually does take a deep breath. “I am calm now. Thank you, Victor.”

Victor opens his mouth to talk, only to have Yuuri beat him to the punch.

“Haveaniceday.” He scrambles to get up, and get away when—

“No.”

Phichit, who had been an observer all along on the other table, moves to sit next to Victor.

Oh hell no.

Yuuri gives him The Look.

“No _no_.”

The Eye vs The Look.

Fight!

Sensing his chance, Phichit breaks the staredown and turns to Victor with a smile, “Hi Victor, I’m the ex-friend, Phichit, Yuuri’s friend.”

“Phichit—” Yuuri whines.

Victor nods and shakes Phichit’s hand, “Ah, yes, the ex-friend, the evil perpetrator. Delighted to meet your acquaintance, Oh Evil One.”

“Smart boy.” Phichit beams, “So Victor, are you busy lately? We actually have this little assignment in class—”

“You wouldn’t!”

“—and Yuuri thinks you’d make a great subject, isn’t that right, Yuuri?”

Yuuri had two options: he could tell Victor Nikiforov yes, and proceed to die a slow, laborious death, or he could tell Victor Nikiforov no, that he’d be a horrible subject, which would offend him, and Yuuri’d be back on the path to whatever path life took him, and Victor would be on his way to whatever it was that involved him and his godliness.

Victor’s eyes were on him however, and it was the most serious he’s ever seen him. It was almost like Victor knew of the war going on inside his brain, which only terrified Yuuri all the more. Because he knew how messy his thought processes were and how they didn’t always line up, and he didn’t always do the most logical thing, because if he were to do the logical thing right now, it was to stop making up conversations about himself in his head and actually talk to Victor.

“It’s not interesting at all,” Yuuri mutters, looking down at the floor, wishing it would hurry up and swallow him whole already.

_Dear universe, would it really kill you to grant me this one wish?!_

“I’d love to hear more about it.” Victor says, “There’s really only so much body slams I can take.”

“Oops,” Phichit grins sheepishly, but Yuuri, he…

Mustering all the courage he has, adrenaline coursing through his veins, he closes his eyes and decides to go for it.

“I need to capture someone’s essence.” Yuuri blurts out…

At exactly the same time that Chris from class walks past. He lets out a whistle and gives him the thumbs-up, “Way to use that line, Yuuri!”

Oh God.

This was precisely why he can’t have nice things.

 _Open up!_ Yuuri inwardly screams at the ground.

“Essence, huh? Is this Mr. Shaw’s class?” Victor leans forward, the bench creaking under the shift of his weight, “This is the final project, right? What do you want me to do?”

The noise in Yuuri’s head fades. By some bizarre twist of fate, Victor was still actually here.

“Thank you so much, you have no idea how much—”

“It isn’t for free, though,” Victor waves a finger, and Yuuri’s heart, which he thought had started floating out of his mouth, sinks down into the pit of his stomach.

Of course it wasn’t, but—

“Name your price.”

“Yuuri Katsuki, in exchange for ‘capturing my essence’,” the upperclassman gently takes hold of Yuuri’s hands and brings them up to his lips, startling the younger man, “Will you be my partner?”


End file.
